What makes Mona Lisa’s smile so intriguing? What makes Picasso’s portraits so compelling? Kurt Andersen hosts artists Chuck Close and Devorah Sperber, with neuroscientists Margaret Livingstone, Chris Tyler and Ken Nakayama, as they examine the power of brain imaging technology to illuminate how we perceive the most intimate yet public of features, the human face.

Not long ago, the idea of a computer beating a human at chess was the stuff of science fiction. But some of the most creative programmers of the 1980s and 90s were determined to make it a reality. And they did.

Are we alone? It’s a question that has obsessed us for centuries, and now we have the technology to do more than wonder. Scientists on the hunt for distant planets and extraterrestrial intelligence explore faraway galaxies and barely visible realms.

Join us for #YourDailyEquation with Brian Greene. Every Mon – Fri at 3pm EDT, Brian Greene will offer brief and breezy discussions of pivotal equations. Even if your math is a …

The mechanism of collapsing stars falls short of explaining the existence of supermassive black holes—giants that weigh millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun. Astrophysicist Priya …

Just announced winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize, David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, discovered how the sensations of temperature and touch are encoded at a molecular level. Blending physics and …